


Bad Habits

by yfere



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/M, I don't know what I'm doing, M/M, Multi, Tags Subject to Change, short fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-11
Updated: 2018-12-11
Packaged: 2019-09-16 05:22:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16947798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yfere/pseuds/yfere
Summary: Caleb reflects on his deal with Fjord.





	Bad Habits

**Author's Note:**

> Question: Why would you write a fic that is going to be immediately obsolete? Answer: I have no self control, and I hate myself.
> 
> Anyway, this is going to be a 3 to 5 part series of little vignettes, in different perspectives. Fjord is up next and, hoo boy.

Fjord looked pleased—manic, even, as he swam for the exit. Caleb took a moment to try and settle the unease curled in his gut, and risked a glance at Jester. She shook her head at him. And it was too bad, wasn’t it? Too bad that she had been there, but. Maybe this would make things easier in the long run. They would return to the Menagerie Coast, bring her back to her mother, and maybe by then she would have put out of her mind any notions she had of befriending murderers and madmen.

  
He sucked in a breath, suffused with the taste of their blood. _Was_ Fjord mad?

  
He could not have said, a few weeks ago. Now, with salt burning into his palm, the feeling of familiarity, a thrilling recognition thrumming from Fjord’s fingertips. Having seen the red light curving around the provocative tilt of his head. _Aren’t you the least bit curious?_

  
_Ja,_ he was a bit of a madman.

  
_We understand each other._

  
It was better in the long run.

_____

“I think I’m slipping,” he said to Beauregard, later. “Bad habits.” It was an easy enough admission to make, after the fact, when he was in no danger of losing what he had gained. Better to ask forgiveness.

  
Beau looked only slightly mollified. “No fucking kidding,” she snarled. “You guys could have sunk the ship. Drowned everyone on board, even assuming _we_ made it through. Do you really want more deaths on your conscience?”

  
Nott made an offended sound, but Caleb waved his hand to shush her from objecting. “That is a fair point,” he said, because it was. This seemed only to agitate Beau further, however, sent her pacing frantically around the room. She pointed a shaking finger in his direction, and he wondered, with a kind of detachment, just how hard she was trying not to punch him.

  
“I don’t like it when you’re like this,” she said. “If you’re not going to stand up for yourself, if you knew you shouldn’t have done it, why do it in the first place?”

  
“I didn’t know it would call a storm—”

  
“You didn’t know _what_ it did!”

  
“—but I knew it would call something. Conjuration, elemental magic, blood. The magic was ancient, _ancient._ It would have been something powerful, and something _extremely_ dangerous.”

  
Confusion seemed to pull her up short. “Then-- _Why?_ ”

  
Caleb shrugged. “I decided to place my trust in Fjord.” He hoped his smile wasn’t too wide. It might be off-putting. “And I was right to, wasn’t I? I would do the same for you, Beauregard.”

  
She took a step back. “No kidding you’re slipping,” she repeated. “Why don’t you use your own head for once, instead of fucking—caving to everything?”

  
“Do you want me to begin using my own judgment?” They both knew what she’d thought of it in the past.

  
“…I don’t know.”

  
“Wise,” he said, as she left the room.

  
It was more comforting to speak to Beauregard than she could know. She was forthright—which was, of course, why he couldn’t trust her to keep quiet forever, could only hope to placate her in the meantime with more of the secrets and confidences she hungered for. Digging the grave deeper, as it were, until she figured out the worth of his corpse. But he appreciated her brand of brash honesty all the same, appreciated her remonstrance, even when he allowed it to be a little misdirected.

  
Yes, he was slipping into bad habits. Just not quite the ones she knew about.

Jester was too distracted to hear about the favor, and Beau really only knew the broadest outline of his past. There were things he’d skirted over, things he’d kept vague. This most of all.

  
A ghost of a memory brushed along his skin—two pairs of lips, on his neck and his hands, warming them against the autumn wind, stronger on the roof of their country house. _I’ll catch us when we fall,_ she told them, hair whipping across her face. He snatched the feather from her hand, tried to tickle their noses and their cheeks, till they fell laughing over each other. They tipped over the roof in a tangle of limbs, but with a whispered word, she slowed them to a drift, and he had time to steal a kiss before their feet touched the ground.

  
Then— _his_ hair, newly shorn like the rest of theirs, brushing against the bottom of Caleb’s immobile chin. Trent, an imposing presence farther back in the doorway, but Caleb managing relax a fraction even so, inhaling. _It won’t be too much for you to handle_ , he promised Caleb in an undertone. _I know you, and we’ve both gotten good at this._ And it’s true—when he was roused by the astringent taste of a healing potion, Caleb knew they both passed Ikithon's test, and he couldn’t help the warm thrill he felt through the pain when their lips met.

  
...They had all gotten worse from there.

  
Caleb watched Fjord on the deck, fingers curling in against the scar on his palm. As always, he cut a dashing figure, a silhouette of clean scalpelled lines against the sunset. It made Caleb want to do something rash. He wanted to escalate, wanted to stress the line of trust they’d tethered together. _Let’s try to jump from the crow’s nest. Let’s try to get drowned. Let me paralyze you, just for a minute or two, and have my way._

  
A droplet of blood splashed onto the rails, and Caleb startled. He’d been clenching his fist too hard—pierced through the scabs with his fingernails. After a moment’s consideration, he readjusted his arm bandages to cover the wound.

  
_Is this what I’m like?_ he thought, with a pull of bitterness. _Can I really do this again?_

  
A moot point. It was already done.

  
A breath—in, and out. That was enough. Better things to focus on—an unfinished point in his notes from last night, his promise to work out the kinks in a new spell with Nott. He returned to his quarters.


End file.
